As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users may be information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information may be handled, how the information may be handled, how much information may be processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications.
In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and/or software components that may be configured to process, store, and/or communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and/or networking systems. In order to process, store and manage the information, a hard disk drive or solid state drive may be included in the information handling system. As information handling systems become more compact and complex, various issues have occurred.
One type of information handling system may be a server, which may be a processor-based network device that may manage network resources. As examples, a file server may be dedicated to storing files, a print server may manage one or more printers, a network server may manage network traffic, and a database server may process database queries. A Web server may service Internet World Wide Web pages.
A server may be implemented as a “stand alone” or monolithic server in which a single chassis contains a single set of processing resources and an associated set of I/O resources. A multiprocessor monolithic server may, for example, include two or more processors that share access to a common system memory and a common set of peripheral devices including persistent storage resources, network interface resources, graphical display resources, and so forth. In other implementations, some of the I/O resources available to the server may be provided as external components. Persistent storage, for example, may be provided to a monolithic server as an external box.
In more recent years, servers may have been implemented as “blade servers.” Blade servers may be so named because they employ server blades, which are thin, modular electronic circuit boards containing one or more microprocessors, memory, and/or other server hardware and/or firmware. Blade servers, which may sometimes be referred to as a high-density servers, typically include a space saving, rack-based chassis that may accept multiple server blades. Blade servers may be often used in clusters of servers dedicated to a single task. For example, a blade server may function as a web server by servicing web-based requests addressed to one or more universal resource locators (URLs). In this implementation, the blade server may route individual requests to different server blades within the blade server based on factors including the current loading of individual blades and the locality of information required to respond to a request, all in a manner that may be invisible to the user.
Servers may be sometimes arranged in data centers where power management and power conservation may be an increasingly important consideration. Server components generate heat that may be dissipated to maintain performance parameters as well as the electrical and mechanical integrity of the server. Traditional thermal management efforts may have focused on reducing temperature of the data center in order to cool the server components. As part of these efforts, servers may increasingly be located in geographies with climate characteristics conducive to reducing temperatures. As data centers become colder, storage as part of or used with a server or a server blade may begin operation before it reaches a threshold temperature that may ensure the ensuing reads/writes are reliable. This may result in errors in data storage, management and/or communications.